Abstract

Studies on nanotechnology's media representations have focused mainly on UK and US, with little attention to other countries. In addition, most studies focused mainly on risk/benefits analytical frame to analyse media texts. This study is an analysis of Spanish national press coverage of nanotechnology to determine what issues are associated with nanotechnology, identifying their evolution across the past ten years. We based our analysis on the idea that in the public sphere there are competing definitions in what is a complex game played for control of semantics in the public sphere (Gaskell et al., 1998). We refer the notions of "anchoring" and "objectification" (Moscovici, 1988) to analyze this process. Similarly, we refer to the notion of "mediascapes" (Van Loon, 2002), the symbolic environment in which a technology is debated. This study is an attempt to operationalize the notion of anchoring using a mixed methodological approach has been used combining text mining and qualitative analysis techniques. Hence, our research questions were how nanotechnology has been anchored in the Spanish National Press? In addition we analysed more in detail how the nanotechnology risk discourse has been anchored. Our data includes more than 600 articles from the most important Spanish newspapers (El Pais, El Mundo and ABC) that include more than ten years of coverage (1997-2010). We applied text mining techniques (using multi-correspondence analysis and cluster analysis of elementary context) to identify longitudinal evolution of themes in the overall coverage and differences between newspapers. Findings suggest an overall positive coverage and a several clusters of meanings as predominant that relate to economic development and growth, national and European policies. Risk discourse, present in the early years become more and more marginal more recently.